Hidden Keyboard Shortcuts in Premiere Pro That Will Cut Your Edit Time

Knowing Adobe Premiere Pro's default keyboard shortcuts is a baseline. The editors who move fastest are the ones who've mapped custom shortcuts to the actions they hit dozens of times a day, and most of those slots are completely empty by default.

Coming to you from Kelsey, the Premiere Gal, this practical video walks through a stack of custom Adobe Premiere Pro keyboard shortcuts that don't exist out of the box. Kelsey opens the keyboard shortcuts panel (Option+Command+K on Mac, found under File on PC) and shows exactly how to search for commands, check whether a key combination is already taken, and assign something memorable. The first example is "Magnification Fit," which snaps your program or source monitor back to a fitted view instantly. There's no default shortcut for it, so she assigns Option+1. It's a small thing, but if you're zooming in to check details and then hunting for the dropdown to reset the view, that friction adds up fast across a long edit.

From there, she gets into keyframe interpolation shortcuts, which is where things get genuinely useful. Applying ease in and ease out in Premiere normally means right-clicking a keyframe and navigating a menu. She assigns Option+S for ease in and Option+E for ease out, chosen specifically because those letter combinations weren't already claimed by Premiere's defaults. She also pairs those with shortcuts for jumping between keyframes, Option+N for next and Option+Command+P for previous, so you can move through an animation and apply easing to each keyframe without ever touching the mouse. The reasoning she walks through for picking letters that connect to the action (S for "start," E for "end") makes these shortcuts stick faster than arbitrary assignments.

The video also covers toggle transform (Option+G) and toggle crop (Option+C), which surface handles directly in the program monitor without having to click into the effects controls and select Motion manually. The select label group shortcut is another practical one: assign a key, click one clip, and every clip sharing that label color gets selected simultaneously. That's the move when you want to batch-adjust volume across all your dialogue clips or swap the color label on an entire category of audio at once. Kelsey also covers "Select Matching," which selects every instance of the same source clip in the timeline, handy when you've cut a clip into several pieces and need to scale all of them together.

The second half of the video gets into project navigation shortcuts that matter most on larger, messier projects. Reveal Sequence surfaces the active sequence inside your project panel so you can duplicate it quickly. Reveal in Project does the same for a clip you have selected in the timeline. Reveal in Finder (or Explorer on Windows) takes you straight to the file on your hard drive, which is exactly what you need when a clip is buried somewhere it shouldn't be and you need to move it before the project breaks. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Kelsey.